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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines whether gender roles and ethnicity are influenced by tourism in Central Himalaya? The main focus of this paper is on the dialect between gender relations and ethnicity and the impact of reconstructing women's identity on the border between traditional and modern society.

Paper long abstract:

"When there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters." (Fanon 1967:219)

This paper seeks to focus on the dialect between gender relations and ethnicity and to examine the impact of reconstructing women's identity on the border between traditional and modern society. In this lecture one case study will be presented, namely gender relations in North India in relation to tourists who represent modern society.

The main research question is whether gender roles and ethnicity are influenced by tourism in Central Himalaya?

In order to elucidate this research several issues will be examined:

(i) Women are expected to maintain their cultural identity and its boundaries ("border guards"), symbolized by retaining their traditional role, i.e. a traditional style of dress, public behaviour, restriction on social and physical mobility, etc.

(ii) While women are expected to play the role of "border guards", men allow themselves to cross over the social borders and bring social changes into their traditional society.

(iii) Nevertheless, hidden power is exercised on men by women; masculine identity can be achieved only as long as women's traditional identity is symbolically reconstructed.

The analytical framework is based on three interrelated paradigms; (i) within post-colonialism I will use Fanon's psychoanalytical perspective about the dialect between the master and the slave (ii) Scott's theory about the art of resistance. (iii) Geertz's paradigm about negotiating primordial identities.